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The World of Illusion Knitting

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PICKING UP THREADS

This was written in
2007
so is now very dated

Have you been wondering what happened to Woolhelmina’s rejected friends? They were always around and looking for a place to settle down. There were many sheep including Rambo, a ewenicorn, the Flock Ness Monster, Sir Lambcelot, a sheep of the desert, sheeps that pass in the night, the Baaber of Seville, Rameo and Eweliet, the Sheep of Things to Come and lots of others with equally silly names. Thinking up silly names on a particular theme becomes addictive and we were addicted. The drawings and their names had to be used. They worked themselves into a little book which we called A Sheep of the Old Flock – An autobaaography and study of lambguage. We ventured into the realms of ISBNs again and published the book ourselves but printed by a local firm. We didn’t make any attempt to advertise or sell this book either but it still sells steadily to those who come across other aspects of our work and love the sheep.

Somehow it came to the attention of another publisher who contacted us, out of the blue, and asked if we could produce drawings with titles, but no other text, for three small books. These books were to be published under the title of Paws for Thought. The three books they were thinking of were of cats, dogs and pigs – until we pointed out that pigs don’t have paws. They settled for cats and dogs and the books were duly published for the Christmas market with the titles Another Purrfect Day and It’s a Dog’s Life. There have been other cartoons, silly words and ridiculous ideas since. They raise their heads occasionally - but we were heading in a different direction.

Following the commission from Brown Sheep we were struck by the idea of using an afghan as a canvas. Some of our earlier ideas were too big to fit onto a sweater or jacket and here was an opportunity to put them onto a large flat surface. From Square to Eternity had always been a favourite but there had never been enough space to show that the squares really do double in width after each alternate square.

Now we could have a row of eight small motifs, a row of four larger motifs, starting in exactly the same way, and two even larger motifs. It needed a lot of yarn so I unearthed two bags of similar yarn, one in dark green, the other in bluish grey. I didn’t like either colour but, as I wasn’t sure I would like the finished item, I went ahead with them. I liked it and it taught me a lesson. I didn’t need to like the colours in the same way I had to like them if I was going to wear them. They could be chosen for the effect they created together, not whether they suited me personally.

We read a lot of Maths textbooks. That’s not strictly true because usually it was a matter of flicking through for diagrams that would fit the rules of the shapes we could use. Anything made up entirely of shapes with angles that were multiples of 45 degrees deserved further investigation. The oft repeated phrase ‘I could knit that’ came from looking through some very boring textbooks. One book, in particular had a lot to offer. The far from boring Curious and Interesting Geometry had many line drawings to inspire us. It was written by David Wells and illustrated by John Sharp. One sees the name of an author on the cover of a book but when the name of the illustrator only appears on an inside page it doesn’t have the same impact. It was some years later that we realised that the illustrator and a man who was to have a great deal of influence on us were one and the same person.

In that book we had found a drawing we had never been able to use until now. We were intrigued by the drawing of the smallest number of different squares which can make a larger square. This arrangement of 21 squares had been discovered in 1978 by A.J.W.Duijvestijn, with the help of a computer. Since 1939 it had been thought that 55 was the smallest number.

We could use it in a way he would never have imagined. We had always thought it would have to be too big to fit on a sweater but it could be used for a wall-hanging. The finished piece was less than one metre square. The squares were made in shades of blue and, when it was finished, Square Deal was stapled to a wooden board which had been covered in navy blue fabric. This also found a home in my classroom. It provided a nice exercise in arithmetic when pupils were told the sizes of some of the squares and had to find the measurements of the others. They worked in centimetres, I worked in numbers of stitches (or, in this case, multiples of numbers of stitches) but the maths was just the same.

Shortly before Woolly Thoughts was published my mother had suddenly started taking an interest in knitting again, and so had her neighbour, Beryl, who was a keen knitter. They had both produced baby cardigans, then other larger garments, from vague written instructions. They had proved that the methods worked and they could progress to designs of their own, from the ideas in the book.  There was a certain attraction to working in small pieces. This type of knitting gave a sense of having achieved something after each piece and the urge to move on to another. Mum was hooked and so was her neighbour. I called on their services for four afghans, and parts of a fifth. I still find it incredible that my mother could maintain interest in knitting long enough to complete something the size of a single bed when she had not been able to finish a cardigan for me when I was a small child.

First Mum knitted twenty-four twelve-inch squares for Have It All Ways. Each square had four triangles, one each in red, blue, green and yellow. These triangles were arranged in such a way that every completed square showed a different arrangement of the colours. The pieces were easy, and mindless, to knit but each was quickly completed and the whole project provided a certain amount of mental challenge to ensure that all the squares looked different. There are really only six totally different squares but each of these can be placed four ways round. The squares were stitched together in a systematic way to make it obvious that all possible combinations had been taken into account.

Mathematically, it solved a problem that occurs frequently, in many different formats, such as ‘How many different ways can four people be seated round a table?’ For some pupils a pictorial representation of the problem was a revelation. Being able to turn the people into colours opened a door for some who struggled with such concepts. Were we teaching Maths or Logic? Did it matter? We were encouraging children to think and clear thinking has to be a good thing for mathematical learning.

Have It All Ways was the first to be made with the intention of using it for teaching in school. It was never going to see use as a blanket. It was a wall-hanging but we stuck with the afghan label as it could be a dual-purpose item. It had a channel at the top where a pole could be pushed through and it could be suspended from a chain. When the pole was removed it was just a blanket for lying on, or under, dressing up in, or anything else kids want to do with blankets.

Click here to see more about From Square To Eternity
Click here to see more about Square Deal
Click here to see more about Have It All Ways

8a. SHEEP AND OTHER ANIMALS